The White Lie (17 page)

Alan went over the story again. Ursula was hysterical in the boat, Ursula was raving, not making sense, not letting him board, not letting him give her the oar back that he found floating. He’d propped one end for her against the boat hull, holding onto the other, an offering. She swung at it with the remaining oar, knocking it back into the loch and yelling like a banshee. This was the point at which he began to feel dreadfully unwell. He swam away, fearing he was going to pass out, and went and sat on the shore, hearing her yelling subside and end. He sat on the shore, feeling too ill to move, lying back on the gravel, his knees up, looking up at the blue sky, wet and hot and beginning already to be clammy, his heart thumping unevenly, his chest hurting him, spasms contracting his heart like a belt drawn repeatedly tight, and feeling at the same time that somehow it had bruised. He lay back and expected to die and must have slept—actually he thought he might have lost consciousness—because then, the next thing he knew, he’d come round with a jolt. He didn’t know how much later it was (his watch was waterlogged and useless), and Ursula was there, still sitting in the boat, sitting quietly and not moving. He felt very tired but otherwise normal. He swam back out to her, very slowly, anxious that the pains might return, and she let him board without a word, without a flicker of interest in him, and then he rowed her back to the beach.

“So. You had chest pain and you passed out, you think, on the shore,” Euan said. “But then when you woke you felt well enough to swim, to climb into the rowing boat, to row Ursula back.”

“I know it sounds unlikely, but it’s what happened. The pain had gone off and I had to do something.”

“I see.”

“It was the chest pain that stopped me keeping looking for him. You understand that?”

“I understand that,” Euan said, closing and opening his eyes in acceptance.

“I spent a good ten minutes diving and looking, even before I tried to board the boat. I want you to see that. And after ten minutes of looking . . .”

“Yes,” Euan told him. “We do see.”

“Please go on,” Henry said.

He paints it well, the word picture. I see him, Alan on the shore, his arms to his chest, his groaning. I see him sleep. I see him waking, going out to Ursula again, swimming very slowly, barely more than floating, an assisted sort of floating, on his back for some of the time, a great pale starfish creature, blinking, just his arms moving and making slow progress. I see her letting him board, the oar that was floating going into the boat first, and then Alan landing like a big fish over the side, landing heavily like something thought extinct rising out of the deeps, over and onto the deck, and I see him seat himself opposite her.

I see Alan rowing Ursula back to the shore. I see Ursula becoming upset, now that she has to step from the boat.

“She was in a panic, you see, by the time we got back. She wanted to get here and get you. And there wasn’t any choice except to get out of the boat.”

“Why didn’t you pull the boat onto the shore for her so that she wouldn’t have to get wet?”

“I did. I did that. But I was very slow, I’m afraid. I felt unwell and shaky. I was worried I was going to have a heart attack. She couldn’t wait. She got out into the shallows and tripped, immediately, and went down on her knees. She was very frightened.”

“Right,” Euan said. “And then.”

“I watched her go. Coming up here. Crying, making a noise.”

She looked like a little girl who’d hurt herself, running like a child does, her arms held out at her sides.

“I wanted to go after her but I was afraid. The pain was coming back. My chest muscles felt stretched.”

“That was probably to do with the swimming, the effort and the cold.”

“And then I went home. I went home first.”

“That part I don’t get,” Joan chipped in. Euan rolled his eyes at Alan and Alan showed that he was aware of the compliment. “Why go to the cottage first?”

“I told you, I lost my shoes, I had to get new ones. I couldn’t come up here without shoes.”

“But this was an emergency,” Joan persisted.

“He was dead, Mrs Catto.” Alan swivelled to face her. “He was dead. That’s not an emergency. I went across the field to the cottage and came straight here after that. I was out of breath, remember, when Mr Catto and I met, almost ran into each other, off the back stairs. I still had chest pain. I did my best, Mrs Catto, you know. I did my very best for Michael.”

“I’m sure you did,” Euan said, “and I know we don’t sound it, but we are genuinely immensely grateful to you, Alan. We will be. Very grateful. But at the moment I’m afraid none of us is ourselves. We’ve had a terrible shock.”

Alan was nodding.

***

I spent the night before I disappeared in my room at Peattie. I sat on the bed for a long time, trying to articulate the thing I was about to do, to justify it to myself, walking the arc of reasoning, hoping to find that when I made the thing definite in my head, rehearsing it already in the past tense, that there wasn’t any immediate recoil, no plunging loss of conviction. I wanted a practised justification, one I could repeat to myself at low moments, but it didn’t work: I failed to feel anything much at all. I failed utterly to have any real thoughts about it. It made no sense; I knew that. I knew even then that taking myself away was never going to satisfy me as a revenge, but I knew I’d do it anyway. I went to dinner and was monosyllabic, and looked as if I were deep in thought, when actually nothing was going on in my head whatsoever. I seemed preoccupied, Edith was to say later, though she’d been positive enough on the phone when Ottilie rang to check I was there. My mother told Edith she’d be at Peattie for tea the next day and hoped to see me, but not to tell me she was coming.

The morning of the day I disappeared I went out for an early loch swim, came back and ate a bacon sandwich and then retreated to my room. It was already so hot that my body had dried, my shorts had dried, on the walk back, shoeless over the gravel. Going into my room, everything looked and felt new; it was as if I’d already left and it had passed into history. My room at Peattie still bore the look, the deserted ossified look of a boy’s, as if the boy had died aged 11, when we moved away. It still does. Nothing changes, other than the linens and the few things, books mostly, that I added to it later as a weekend visitor. Airfix kit aeroplanes hang by strings, drifting gently in the draught. The ceiling has a zodiac painted on it, in blue and gold. Boys’ books and games, souvenirs, flags, are propped up on shelves. Great framed maps are lined up on the walls, antique maps that showed confidence in a partly charted and partly imagined world. These all are things Henry provided for me when I was a child.

I opened the window and sat by it, shoving the screaming reluctant sash upward. I pulled the desk over, scraping and bouncing it across the parquet floor, to sit by the window and write the letter to my mother. I couldn’t find any paper at first. My pen proved low on ink. It all took longer than it should have, and so I got to the linen room ten minutes late, Mog frowning at me for my bad timekeeping. I didn’t stay long. I helped her with the maths, not really in the mood for explaining, and fixed the banana skin hair on the apple head, my mind swimming with the things I’d said and not said in the letter. I told Mog that I had things to do. I went back and read the letter over, my hand poised over it, and sat for a while looking out in case anything else should occur to me, but nothing did. It was shocking, how brief the farewell seemed to be. I left the letter sitting on the bed and went down early to lunch. I was first down and didn’t tarry. I packed a sandwich, folding it into a napkin, took a green apple from the blue glass bowl, and on my way out, shouted to Vita, who was making her way slowly to the drawing room with Mrs Hammill, that I was going now. That’s what I said to her. “Going now.” With, in retrospect, embarrassing fierceness. Not caring how she interpreted it. I didn’t answer her query, her answer; I don’t know what it was. Something was said and not acknowledged. Poor Vita I left staring after me, Mrs H saying something tart about manners and the young. Vita may have realised—though perhaps only later—that in a way it was her fault that I’d decided to go. Henry I didn’t see. Edith I avoided because she’s too intuitive about things like this. I didn’t want to have to look into Edith’s eyes. She’d have read me in an instant and all would have been revealed.

I took my car along the drive as if I were leaving, and then along the lane 200 yards, before turning back in along the loch road, past the cottages. George and Alan were in and around the greenhouses that lunchtime, seeing to tomato trusses and cucumbers and the competition flowers, and bickering. George had been made uncharacteristically short-tempered by the weather. Everything was overheating, the vegetables engorged with sunshine, the tomatoes drying and splitting on the plants. In gardening terms the heat wave was becoming a crisis. It didn’t help that George was unwell—with prostate trouble as well as a bad back—but had insisted that Henry forego his planned temporary replacement, fearing the relief gardener would become permanent and displace him. George had told Henry that Alan would help and didn’t want to be paid, that his son would be offended by money in this situation.

Alan said that he had an argument with his father, about the tomatoes. He didn’t add that it had developed from a dispute about technique, multiplying exponentially, from skill into responsibility, from duty to honour, and thence, devastatingly, into notions of self-respect. Money was at the heart of it; George’s having volunteered Alan to work unpaid. In any case, Alan’s trip down to the loch wasn’t really about the fight he’d had with his father. When he went down to the wood on his bike, Alan was intending to do a spot of fishing. When it’s hot, the trout gather in the deep shady pools beneath the jetty. Some of the older villagers fish here, with Henry’s blessing, but Alan’s a poacher, selling his catch in quantity at the back doors of local hotels. He’d sold some the previous evening to the holidaymakers: the cottage adjoining the Dixons’ place is let by the week in summer.

I sat on the jetty a long time. I sat at its end, my lower legs over the edge, leaning back hard on my hands, looking at the familiar view, the stretch of water enclosed in hills, a heat haze blurring the horizon. I see him now, this boy, this 19-year-old not-quite-man. His shirt’s rolled up at the sleeves, and he has tanned arms, his skin taking and burnishing the sunlight. His hair’s wavy, falling layered past the collar. His features—his nose too big, as Mog says—are set into contempt, and there’s something resigned there, also. It’s made a decision, that face. He’s looking thoughtfully out at the water, not moving. He has fine hands, large and with long fingers that are tanned darker than his forearms. His nails are well shaped, pinker than his hands, and set deep into his fingers. It was a good body. I didn’t appreciate that. His shoulders are wide and strong—a swimmer’s body. His legs are long in his jeans. Now he sits up straighter, bringing one leg up, resting his foot against the plank edge, which is worn gently away like a stone tread on a cathedral stair, leaning forward and grasping the shin, and his feet are bare in the boat shoes, a tanned and hairy ankle just visible.

I heard Ursula before I saw her, and only at the last minute. I heard only the last few pairs of footfalls as she ran barefoot up behind me and put her small white hands over my eyes. She asked me, sitting down beside me on the jetty, why the car was there, half on the beach, its doors and boot open. That last part was easy: it was because of the heat. I told her what I was about to do.

“Leaving? When are you coming home?”

“I’m not, Ursula. I’m not coming home.”

“For a while. Are you going to work somewhere? Do the forestry job somewhere?”

“Yes. The forestry job, I hope. But down in England somewhere. Maybe Yorkshire. It’s beautiful there.”

“You’ve never been to Yorkshire, liar.”

“Wrong. Twice with the climbing club.”

“Oh.” And then, “Can I come visit you on your hill, climb up to see you?”

“I’m afraid not; that won’t be possible.”

“When will you be home?”

“I’m not coming back. I’m going to make a home somewhere else and live there.”

She was quiet, digesting this, and then she said, “You don’t love me.”

“Of course I love you.” It was obvious even to me that this was a lie.

“You don’t love me. I knew you didn’t.”

“I do love you. You’re my friend.”

“I want to be your wife.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

I’d offended her. “You’re young and your heart is very small and tight,” she told me.

I didn’t say anything.

“And green and unripe.”

I knew better than to take issue with her on any of this.

“Some things go rotten without ever ripening,” she added.

I murmured something that could have been construed as assent.

“You need to be tested to understand love,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You’re untested.”

I don’t know where she gets this stuff. From the novels, none of them post-1970, that Edith acquires on her behalf, I can only presume, believing them harmless. Edith has faith in the essential goodness of the pre-1970 world.

“My father,” I began, finding that I couldn’t complete the sentence.

“But that was a negative,” she said. “That wasn’t anything. The past is a nothing until you make it a something, and you did, you wanted to. Why did you want to? I think there’s something very destructive about you, Michael.” Her chin was on my shoulder and she turned it to kiss my neck.

“You may never have anybody love you like I do, never again,” she said.

“I hope I do,” I told her, as soulfully as I could manage.

Something new had occurred to her. “What does your mother think? She’s letting you go off to Yorkshire?”

“She hasn’t been asked.”

Ursula lay back on the jetty, her fingers laced across her eyes, and was quiet, and we sat in silence.

Ursula wasn’t really familiar with the idea of children growing up and moving away. It wasn’t something she’d had experience of, other than for Ottilie’s flight to the
coast, though that only took place at about the same age that Ursula was at now, so wasn’t the usual sort of fledging. Perhaps she’d read something about it, that in the normal course of things children grow up and move away. It’s possible. Everything she knew came from the family and from permitted books, and also from music. I don’t know how it stands now, with the paid companion; Edith said that she’d leave this kind of thing to her judgment and didn’t need consulting. They could reinvent Ursula’s life between the two of them, she said. But certainly in the old days, although there were boxes and boxes of well-used LPs (and still are; Ursula’s devoted to vinyl), first the television was removed and then the radio, so as to avoid talk programmes, which might have caused confusion and upset. This wasn’t alarmist—they would, I’m afraid, have caused confusion and upset. Ursula thinks that every problem she hears of is a problem she’s being called upon to solve. A broadcast made in her presence, in her hearing, is a message to her, an appeal. She never learned to carry the world’s tragedies lightly and cast them off again, letting her own concerns obliterate them, as the rest of us do. She’d urge Edith and Henry to help, to go to the place of crisis, to sort out the problem, or to give all their things away, and then she’d worry about their absence and the ramifications of their needing to donate of themselves or their possessions, and the world’s problems would internalise into her own, the distress building and spreading. I know this because it’s what used to happen, before the radiogram was set to one safe music station and then removed, and the televisions at Peattie were given away, and the daily newspaper was locked up in the office. The televisions were lost when Ursula was eight, when she was taken out of school. In that year of heightened emotion the news upset her, drama upset her, and moving pictures were abandoned. Fiction and non-fiction were indistinguishable to her and each equally threatening. Even now she talks about the characters in the novels she reads as if they’re real, as if they have lives pre- and post-dating the narrative. She said to me once that she didn’t think the books always ended the same way, but that might have been a joke. It’s hard to tell what’s playfulness and what’s something else in Ursula’s case.